There is nothing as permanent as a temporary fix that works.
Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution.
My temporary PHP fix from 2014 has nearly 20M installs. Today I'm deprecating it
71–80 of 93 posts
Re: My temporary PHP fix from 2014 has nearly 20M installs. Today I'm deprecating it
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think it ever made sense. Code reuse improves efficiency when the code can be shared in memory, or when it needs to be updated and you only have to change it in one place. JS packages don’t give you sharing beyond what you’d get from copying the code. And these little things don’t need to be updated, and in fact you probably don’t want them to be. It’s a case of doing something without understanding why it’s…
This is all very easy to say in hindsight. It's missing the context of having been there, I think. Things were just different. Also, way more fun.
I was definitely saying it at the time. But I wasn't embedded in the ecosystem, it was very much "those JavaScript guys are nuts, why would they do this?"
Re: My temporary PHP fix from 2014 has nearly 20M installs. Today I'm deprecating it
#73PHP did extensions and PECL modules wrong, due to its roots as a web server language. With managed hosting, often PHP doesn't offer what we might think of as basic functionality, since the admin didn't install/enable it. So it makes sense that these little one-off packages exist to route around snafus.
It's still my favorite language though, since it comes closest to shell language but with C-style syntax (other than maybe Perl, which is a write-only language and hard to read, which unfortunately inspired Ruby to inherit some anti-patterns).
I often dream about writing a modern hacker language that combines the best of everything like functional programming, higher-order methods, const by default, parallelism, sync blocking rather than async nonblocking concurrency, etc. It would also undo the pass-by-reference footguns added by PHP 5+ and return to the pass-by-value copy-on-write style of arrays. That's why I really can't endorse attempts like Hack which just introduce a new standard with its own problems.
The insight being that LLMs work around the limitations of mainstream languages and frameworks, rather than challenging assumptions from first principles and building better foundations.
Re: My temporary PHP fix from 2014 has nearly 20M installs. Today I'm deprecating it
#74PHP did extensions and PECL modules wrong, due to its roots as a web server language. With managed hosting, often PHP doesn't offer what we might think of as basic functionality, since the admin didn't install/enable it. So it makes sense that these little one-off packages exist to route around snafus. It's still my favorite language though, since it comes closest to shell language but with C-style syntax (other than…
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Re: My temporary PHP fix from 2014 has nearly 20M installs. Today I'm deprecating it
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
The down vote was me - I really think calling deprecating a project after a decade+ telling the world 'depending on this project was a bad idea' is tone deaf.
It doesn't say that depending on it was a bad idea, but that depending on it going forward is a bad idea, and they've gone the extra mile and made an announcement including information about what better alternatives are not available. Would you prefer it just sat there unfixed and unsupported?
that is NOT what it says - "tell the word that depending on this project WAS a bad idea" ... 'was' - past tense, as in depending on it in the past was a bad idea
Re: My temporary PHP fix from 2014 has nearly 20M installs. Today I'm deprecating it
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
what a broken ecosystem.. The crazy thing is not that the package exists, but that it is used by JS devs.
I feel like I have to remind people of this quite often, but the history is such that npm was lightweight at one point, bundling wasn't a thing, and while `isodd`/`iseven` are of course silly, things like `isarray` were not functions that existed back then (we didn't have Array.isArray). `typeof [] === 'object'` in JS, so e.g. my package `is-arrayish` checked for a similar structure to an array (whereas Id guess `isa…
You want to implement your own is-odd in your code - simple, right? isOdd = (x) => x % 2 == 1
Ut oh, your code is broken for negative numbers now since % isn't a true modulo operator...
Fine then, isOdd = (x) => x % 2 != 0
Ut oh, your code is broken because isOdd("hi") returns true now...
Fine then, isOdd = (x) => if(!isNumber(x)) throw... else return x%2 != 0
Ut oh, your code is now broken because isOdd(2^55+1) returns true now...
Re: My temporary PHP fix from 2014 has nearly 20M installs. Today I'm deprecating it
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
These packages are basically memes at this point... Those download figures cannot be accurate for real production usage. I don't believe any programmer is actually using these. isarray and left-pad are at least functions that didn't used to be in the standard library, to slightly excuse them.
Actual programmers do indeed use these packages, and in large numbers. I was in the unfortunate situation a few years ago of hiring a couple of interns (both juniors in a decent CS program) who relied heavily on these types of packages. They honestly thought that it saved them time and they didn’t seem to comprehend the bloat they were adding to otherwise simple code that they could’ve written themselves in 30 second…
It feels like (to me at least) that the pendulum is swinging back the other way. But maybe this is just my preference.
Re: My temporary PHP fix from 2014 has nearly 20M installs. Today I'm deprecating it
#78I don't think I quite valued the Open Source PHP ecosystem at the time as much as I should have. I have a project that still grabs a ton of installs for some reason (3+ million to date and apparently growing) which is way beyond anything I would have expected.
Re: My temporary PHP fix from 2014 has nearly 20M installs. Today I'm deprecating it
#79There is nothing as permanent as a temporary fix that works.
Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution.
"it was written by that guy 5 years ago,but he left; so nobody is in charge and nobody understands it anymore, but it still works perfectly and we do not need any upgrades" :-))
Re: My temporary PHP fix from 2014 has nearly 20M installs. Today I'm deprecating it
#80We used to work together at AOL. Glad to see you on here; I hope you're doing great!
Reading this threw me back to 2014 - how was working for AOL back then?
I worked there around that time, and a little later. The company had recently ish gotten independent and was actually pretty optimistic. The basic plan was to use the clearly dying dialup business to fund new businesses in media and ads, and there was even hope that the mail and search stuff could be turned around. I think the ads and media stuff broadly worked, most of the media businesses are still going though they were divested by AOL and later Yahoo. The ads stuff did ultimately have a shelf life as the industry consolidated more on Google and Facebook but that was many years away from 2014. Mail and search were eventually merged into their yahoo counterparts post merger.
People at AOL realized how the brand was that of a "wow you still exist" so were pretty good at not putting it too intrusively on new or acquired products. Good for those products, bad for the chances of revitalizing the brand. One of the interesting things post-merger with Yahoo was how much Yahoo people had not adopted the same attitude about their own brand.